Angela Trudell Vasquez, Margaret Rozga

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Nicole Taylor

Angela Trudell Vasquez, Madison poet laureate, 2020-22.

Angela Trudell Vazquez, Madison’s poet laureate (the first Latina to hold that position), and Wisconsin’s past poet laureate Margaret Rozga will celebrate National Poetry Month by discussing their latest collections. Trudell Vasquez’s My People Redux (2022) is her fourth volume of poetry, and pieces take readers from Madison to Seattle, from Milwaukee to Mexico. Rozga is based in Waukesha, and her fifth volume, Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (2021), explores everything from fair housing in Milwaukee to the pandemic and politics. Seating is limited, but the event will be livestreamed via Crowdcast; RSVP is required.

media release: Live @ MTM: Angela Vasquez with Margaret Rozga

Where: Mystery to Me (seats are limited, Get Tickets)

Livestream: Crowdcast (RSVP)

About My People Redux

In My People Redux, Angela Trudell Vasquez creates in vivid images and musical language a world where children “cycle, talk, sing—” run, dangle from tree limbs, hunt, peer, trample, and search. In their joyful activity they realize, “This is where my power / started flowing.” It is not a trouble-free world. Children played in the DDT- laced cornfields; refugees are turned away at the border. Sometimes a person “crawls to the finish line.” But it is also a world where “Everybody is somebody’s child” and there are people “who will throw open their doors/ and let them in, let them in.” It is also a world where “pen can tap into my brain, // reveal what is hiding, // not to court friends or foes, // but to keep from disappearing. In these compelling poems, Vasquez welcomes us to recover with her what the great grandfather knew, “the original place of green grace.” –Margaret Rozga, author of Holding My Selves Together, New & Selected Poems and 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, editor, publisher, and activist. She is the current City of Madison Poet Laureate (2020-2024) and the first Latina to hold the position. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Slow Down, Yellow Medicine Review, Poem-a-Day, About Place Journal and in several anthologies.She has poems on the Poetry Foundation’s website, and was a Ruth Lilly Fellow while at Drake University. In 2018 she was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series and her book, In Light, Always Light, her third collection of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. She guest edited the Spring 2019 edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird, and co-edited a collection of poetry with Margaret Rozga, then 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, entitled Through This Door, that was released in late 2020 through her small press Art Night Books. Finishing Line Press published her fourth collection of poetry, My People Redux, in January 2022. Active nationally too, she has read poems, been a panelist, and presented at Split This Rock and AWP. In the summer of 2021 she became a Macondo Fellow or a Macondista. Current Chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, she helps select the state poet laureate. (angietrudellvasquez.com & artnightbooks.com)

About Holding My Selves Together

In Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems, her fifth volume of poetry, Margaret Rozga brings together some of her best-loved poems about Milwaukee's fair housing marches and her concern for issues of peace and social justice, with new poems that identify with Alice in Wonderland and imagine new Alice adventures. New poems also grapple with issues of recent political turmoil and pandemic-induced uncertainty. These deeply written poems find in language the glue that may hold our selves together.

Wisconsin poet laureate Dr. Margaret Rozga is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha.  Her poems and essays reflect her ongoing concern for social justice issues. Her first book, 200 Nights and One Day presents the story of Milwaukee’s open housing marches. She was a participant in those marches and has coordinated events commemorating their 20th, 40th and 50th anniversaries.  She married civil rights leader Father James Groppi in 1976. Their three children, now all adults, continue to live in Wisconsin.

Rozga has published four additional collections of poems, most recently Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems(Cornerstone Press 2021). As Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2019-2020, Rozga and Madison Poet Laureate Angie Trudell Vasquez co-edited a poetry anthology, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems. This anthology includes work by the nine Wisconsin Poets Laureate and the wonderfully diverse voices of Black, Latinx and white poets from throughout the state.

Rozga’s current work-in-progress is Restoring Prairie, a volume of poems inspired by her 2021 term as Artist in Residence at the UWM at Waukesha Field Station.